It wasn’t long after I’d gotten up that the message came through—that annoying, steady, high-pitched beep in my head was probably one of the things I hate most about the network these days.

When I was younger, I’d learned that our great-grandparents didn’t have the network in their heads—it was something the Lunars and the Martians brought in from off-world. Back then, I still thought being connected to planets and planets full of aliens and strange sights was a great thing; these times I’d gladly give it up, but I have an obligation now.

The message was a reminder of that obligation. It wasn’t another little human from Earth wanting me interviewed for a school paper—it was an update from the diarists.

Usually it was just a reminder they were still working: “168 hours recorded, ready to process.”

Always “Ready to process.” They’d said I wouldn’t see much in the way of finished product from them during my lifetime—mostly it takes a finished life to tell the big picture, and recording me and my thoughts all the time takes a lot of time to work through anyway.

I turned out my lamp and rolled over on my back to watch what the alien diarists had put together. Off-worlders always just close their eyes to read the network, but the sky of Frontier is a dark enough background for me.

What they’d sent was basically a preface—for all the people who don’t know about Frontier, it was kind of a history or introduction to the world. But of course since it was for off-worlders, it started with the colonization of our world. I’d hoped there’d be more icebear history to survive—but I knew there wouldn’t be, not really. When I’d sat in the stifling hot classrooms in my youth, they’d not had anything before themselves. My mother’d taught me what she could, but she didn’t have anything past her own grandparents. Before that, I guess, we all lived solitary lives on the ocean.

Hah, the classrooms! I hadn’t thought about those in ages. The off-worlders all came, or at least originated, from Earth, a warmer and a brighter world. I don’t think any of them could actually survive on Frontier without all those superheated buildings of theirs, and the bulky clothing—I had to wear some of that, even in the heat—

John the polar bear requested a pic for his birthday. He was sort of vacillating between his polar bear character in a naval uniform and his triceratops character Murphy, so I drew both of them for him.

I gave him the sketch at this year’s Furry Fiesta, along with the lineart of the last pic I did for him. Will work on coloring it eventually.

Sorry for the delay in posting. Had a week or so where I didn’t have anything to post, and fell out of the habit. (It’s that easy!)

Anyway, I finished the picture of Taaq Ulluriittuq:

Click to embiggen

I think it came out about right, even though it’s ridiculously permeated by my style.

The description I posted elsewhere with this pic:

ᑖᖅ ᐅᓪᓗᕇᑦᑐᖅ (Taaq Ulluriittuq) out on an iceberg, watching the starless dark.

He usually goes by ‘Starless’ since his given name tends to give others trouble. He lives in Nother in the 28th century, and is the last one of his kind on record. They offered to revive icebearkind by cloning from him, but he didn’t see the point to it—”other folk live just as well as we did”. He moved to a frontier planet and spends most of his nights out on the sea, watching the empty sky.

I suppose that’s not a natural iceberg. It’s probably motorized.

I know it’d be an interesting frontier that would not have a view of any stars… There’s probably some kind of physical barrier to letting the light through, like the dust cloud around Krikkit.

And here’s the result of the scheduled work on the icebear I did this week. Unless someone points out something horrible, this’ll probably be the last pencil version, and I’ll start coloring from here.

I did some unscheduled work on this at the Aurora furmeet on Saturday night, just ’cause it’d been a while. Worked on the shading a bit, and am trying to get the iceberg to resolve some—I know already that it’s too pointy along the top; that’ll be the next thing in need of work.

I really like this guy, hehe. Hopin’ it turns out well.

On a more general note, I’ve decided once a week is a little too infrequently to post here, so instead I’m going to try and post a couple of things every few days.